Movie Review | 'A Beautiful Mind'

From Math to Madness, and Back

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 21, 2001

In "A Beautiful Mind," her biography of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., Sylvia Nasar quotes one of his colleagues: "All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes." Mr. Nash, whose life is a case study in the difficulty — and also the wonder — of living in both, now inhabits a third: the treacle palace of middlebrow Hollywood moviemaking, in which ambiguity is dissolved in reassuring platitudes and freshly harvested tears.

The tears, and the dazzled glow that accompanies them, feel honestly earned. The paradox of Ron Howard's new film, from a script by Akiva Goldsman, is that the story that elicits these genuine emotions is almost entirely counterfeit.

At one point, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), the M.I.T. student who will marry Nash, breezes into his office, brandishing a proof she has devised for a fiendishly difficult hypothesis. Her professor and future husband looks up from the paper coffee cup he is chewing on and glances at her work. "It's elegant, but wrong," he says, delivering a verdict that could just as well apply to "A Beautiful Mind."

Let's work backward, from wrong to elegant. Mr. Nash, now 73, an inordinately gifted, deeply awkward man, possesses one of the most extraordinary mathematical intellects of his generation. By his early 30's, when mental illness overwhelmed his creative powers, he had done important work in a number of fields, including game theory, quantum mechanics and number theory. After three decades of struggle with schizophrenia, he was granted what seemed like a miraculous remission. In 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic science for work he had done as a graduate student at Princeton in the late 1940's.

In outline then Mr. Nash's life has the perfect three-act structure of a screenplay: a sparkling career derailed by adversity and redeemed by a triumph of the spirit. In detail the life, as recounted by Ms. Nasar, a former economics reporter for The New York Times , is a trove of fascinating, troubling information. In a profession whose members have a reputation for oddness, Mr. Nash was a prime number. He was notorious among his colleagues for his antisocial temperament and his predilection for cruel put-downs and dangerous practical jokes.

Before he married Alicia, with whom he had a son named John, he fathered another child, also named John, with a woman named Eleanor Stiers, and abandoned both mother and child to poverty. He formed a number of intense, apparently sexual bonds with other men, and he lost his security clearance and his position at the RAND Corporation after he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men's room in Santa Monica, Calif. When his illness became intractable and his behavior intolerable, Alicia divorced him. (They remarried last June.)

None of this has made it to the screen. Worse, the intellectual and political context that would throw both Mr. Nash's genius and his madness into high relief has been obliterated. "A Beautiful Mind" opens with a speech by the fictitious Professor Helinger (Judd Hirsch), declaring that American mathematicians, having played an important part in the defeat of Nazi Germany, must now turn their attention to defeating Soviet Communism.

This scene, and much of the story that follows, egregiously simplifies the tangled, suspicious world of cold war academia. More than a few mathematicians and scientists at the time, including many at M.I.T., where Nash went to teach after Princeton (not, as the film has it, to conduct top-secret defense-related research), were sympathetic to Communism, and many more (including Robert Oppenheimer, whose name is mentioned in passing) were suspected of such sympathies. While Mr. Nash was not among them, he was hardly the intrepid cold warrior depicted by Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman. Even at RAND, the Defense Department think tank, he was more interested in pure research than in its application, and in 1960 he tried to renounce his United States citizenship to express his belief in the necessity of world government.

All this, apparently, is too much for audiences to take in: anything that would dilute our sympathy by acquainting us with the vicissitudes of Mr. Nash's real life has been airbrushed away, leaving a portrait of a shy, lovable genius. Of course any movie that traffics in biography must edit, foreshorten, emphasize and condense, but "A Beautiful Mind" goes further, becoming a piece of historical revisionism on the order of "J. F. K." or "Forrest Gump," and manifesting a depressing lack of faith in the intelligence of the audience.

How much fidelity do movies owe to the historical figures they purport to be about? This question tends to interest the people who write about movies more than the people who make them. It does not, in any case, seem to have troubled Mr. Howard for a moment. But without stifling the objections noted above — and without giving credence to the trivializing, anti-intellectual rebuttal that it's only a movie (only, as opposed to what?) — "A Beautiful Mind" deserves to be judged on its own terms. Perhaps, adapting the conventions of mathematical notation, the movie character should be thought of as "Nash prime" or Nash i ( i referring to an imaginary number). The story of this Nash is not without its beauty.